Jafar Kareem

My good friend, Jafar Kareem, died suddenly and unexpectedly last year - and too soon: it is too bad there is no one to blame for deaths which we consider clumsily handled and badly mistimed. Jafar had the energy and ideas to pour into his life and work for another 20 years: why on earth snatch away him, of all people, when there are unhappy, ill old people longing for the Great Reaper to come and scythe them down? Of course the big mistake Jafar made was to choose to be born with certain genes which were going to dictate the particular shape he ended up with - a typically merry, endomorphic, pyknic individual; if he had been a bus, he would have had ‘Coronary’ written up on his front notice board. And that was what happened. His gallant frame succumbed - mercifully quickly - to a massive coronary thrombosis and, instead of a hateful life condemned to cardiac invalidism, Jafar was with us no more. And what an enormous gap he left, this short, stocky, joky man, a great crater which covers a huge are of North London - to say the very least. For all I know, there are equivalent craters in Pakistan, Israel, Austria - all places where the indefatigable Jafar made his mark, won friends and influenced people.

When I first heard his life story - he told it to me himself, sitting in my living room one day soon after we had met - I was simply spellbound. I felt like those two boys sitting on the ground in the Pre-Raphaelite picture, The Boyhood of Raleigh, in which the boys are rapt in the presence of a storyteller (Raleigh himself?). It was difficult to absorb Jafar's life story all at once, one could hardly credit that he had fitted so much in. He was born in Calcutta, and was the youngest of a large family. His earliest life was clearly happy and stable - he could never have achieved all he did without solidly internalised good figures. He should, by his father's wish, have gone quietly on from